Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (review)

Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal. By James Taylor Carson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. xiv + 183 pp., series editors' introduction, acknowledgments, notes, index. $40.00 cloth.)

This slim volume is a tersely written survey of Choctaw history from the late Mississippian era in the early sixteenth century until removal in the 1830s. Carson uses an interpretive framework adapted from Fernand Braudel via Anthony Giddens, with help from E. P. Thompson and Clifford Geertz. His aim is to reconstruct both the continuities and discontinuities in Choctaw historical experience.

Carson employs the unusual device of framing his history between the two halves of a short story about Choctaws by the nineteenth-century southern writer William Gilmore Simms. This story, "Oakatibbe," as published in Simms's collection The Wigwam and the Cabin, is based on an incident he either witnessed or was told about when he traveled as a young man from his home in Charleston, South Carolina, to visit his father's plantation in Mississippi. Although Simms wrote many novels, short stories, and poems about Indians, "Oakatibbe" was based on the most authentic piece of Indian culture in all of his voluminous writings—an instance of blood revenge. Simms published three successively elaborated versions of this story. (See John C. Guilds and Charles Hudson, eds., An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms, University of South Carolina Press, in press.) Even so, Simms did not fully understand the cultural basis for blood revenge—it was enforced by the clans on each other, not by the "nation" on behalf of its citizens—and hence the practice of using a work of fiction to frame a work of history has its hazards.

Carson argues that the Mississippian era bequeathed to the Choctaws four long-lasting structural features: (1) the chiefdom form of political organization, (2) a matrilineal kinship system, (3) a male/female division of labor, and (4) certain cosmological beliefs and symbols, including circular ritual forms, a concept of purity and pollution, a four-part division of the cosmos, and certain anomalous monsters. Much evidence can be cited in favor of this argument. But even the most basic structural underpinnings of history give way in time. One may question, for example, whether the Choctaw polity that emerged between 1700 and 1805 can properly be characterized as several "intermediate chiefdoms." While the eighteenth-century Choctaw social order surely comprised elements of social and cultural conventions from an earlier time, the larger world in which the Choctaws existed was new. We might ask, for example, whether their leaders were not so much traditional chiefs as local strong men and mercenaries who sought to function as links in dependency relationships with their masters in the colonial world.

The author makes a commendable effort to cast the historical experience of the Choctaws within the idiom of their traditional worldview. But again, structural features of thought erode in time, as do social arrangements. Did the Choctaw leader Mushulatubbee build his modern two-room dogtrot cabin facing east "so that the rising sun would shine in the windows every morning and remind the chief of [the Choctaw deity] Aba's presence"? Or did he orient it toward the east, as did many many other Americans, to get some light and warmth into his house in the early morning?

Carson's explanation of early-nineteenth-century Choctaw factionalism is novel. In place of the old racist formulation of progressive "mixed-bloods" versus conservative "full-bloods," as well as the more recent theory that the factions were a cynical "new elite" opposed to traditional Choctaws, he proposes that the two factions constellated around two different political strategies. Both factions sought to build a Choctaw "nation" that could hold its own against the Americans. Mushulatubbee and his faction favored a "primordialist" strategy that would hold fast to old economic and political arrangements. The other...